Mobile network traffic has been growing at a very fast pace. In addition, the variation of network end points, the variation of applications, and the variation of mobility states of user equipment devices (“UE”) (e.g., whether or not a UE is moving, and if so, how fast) are growing, and this trend will likely continue.
In the current state of the art, different radio technologies, such as WI-FI and cellular, utilize different management and control mechanisms, and the same is true even within Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”) cellular technologies. Current cellular network management treats all end points as equal. This management approach works for existing device types, which are primarily smart devices such as smart phones, tablets, and the like.
The Internet of Things (“IoT”) is gaining significant momentum in the industry, particularly as machine-to-machine (“M2M”) connectivity improves with new mobile communications technologies. The number of M2M/IoT devices is expected to grow from 5 billion in 2015 to over 25 billion by 2020. With the significant growing trend of M2M and IoT to billions of end points (most of which never move), constantly using the existing management and control mechanisms of provisioning and maintaining complex general packet radio service (“GPRS”) tunneling protocol (“GTP”) tunnels will no longer be the most cost effective method in this new paradigm.